19 Oct
2013
19 Oct
'13
2:31 p.m.
On 19/10/2013 22:07, Chuck Guzis wrote:
On 10/19/2013 01:06 PM, Dave wrote:
From what I remember the drives on our Honeywell (re-badged Magnetic
Peripherals inc? Correct me if I am wrong) could be manually loaded
without too much trouble, but being a Systems Programmer (so some one
who didn't do very much actually programming or operating , just applied
patches and fixes etc) I usually got a real operator to mount the tapes....
I seem to remember the ones on our older H3200 stalling the auxilary
generator during rewind at End of Job. After that the ops used to flip
the offline switch and manually rewind. These were weird 1200BPI NRZI
drives but I have no idea who made those....
I think one thing I really remember was powering
up a 4381 after a
Christmas shutdown. I remember it had two strings of 3380 some 3420
tape units, screen controller and some comms kit. If folks think booting
up Windows is slow they should try powering up the 4381. You did just
hit one which loaded the CPU micro code. You then choose the power on
menu and a whole room would come to life. The controllers all loaded
their micro-code then the disks spun up one cabinet at a time.
Everything in sequence so that nothing tripped the main breakers. A real
wonder to be hold,
When tape auto-loaders were introduced, I hated them. Each reel had
to be with the correct band (none of those sexy plastic reel cases);
the end had to be nice and clean (not wrinkled) and you couldn't use
multiple BOT strips on a tape. If a tape wouldn't thread up, you
started chopping at the end and non-standard reel sizes were a pain to
work with.
In truth, I couldn't see where an autoloader was any more efficient
than a skilled operator loading a tape up. Thank heaves that non-auto
loading drives were still being made.
--Chuck
Dave